Immune response predicts recovery time after surgery

THE operating room is booked, the surgeon is ready – but is your body? One day a blood test will help predict whether you’ll need days or weeks to recover from surgery.

An operation is a stressful experience for your body. The trauma of the knife floods the blood with immune molecules that can trigger inflammation. As a result, some people are confined to bed for weeks, while others can be on their feet within days. The difference probably lies in individual variations in the immune response.

To find out more, a team at Stanford School of Medicine in California, led by Brice Gaudillière, used a cell-mapping technique called mass cytometry to search for an “immune signature” that predicts recovery times. Mass cytometry allows researchers to work out which immune cells are present in a blood sample, and what molecules they are producing – a measure of their activity.

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They analysed samples from 32 people who’d had hip-replacement surgery, taking samples at various times in the following six weeks. If a particular type of white blood cell was active in the first 24 hours after surgery, the person was more likely to take at least three weeks to recover. If the activity of these cells was low or decreased in the first 24 hours, they recovered faster (Science Translational Medicine, doi.org/v2p).

Gaudillière is now looking to develop a blood test that predicts recovery times before surgery is carried out.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Immune response predicts recovery time after surgery”